With Christmas on the horizon I stumbled across this video, again, recently. I’m a little busy, but I should have a big announcement coming soon. So for now, just watch this poor little girl and maybe feel a little better about your day:

~RCS

In my head I can hear the fairy yelling, “Free at last, Free at last, I am Free–Oh god, no, I regret my decisi–AAHHH!”

I know I promised the merch post today, but I wanted to get this off my chest while I was still thinking of it…

I drive past a Strip Club on my way to work (and back home) and the other day I saw a school bus that, I assume was broken down, parked in their parking lot. The sight of a school bus in a strip club parking lot got me thinking about weird things. And here is a list of those weird things!

They didn’t have field trips like that when I was in school!

They needed a whole bus for Take Your Daughters to Work day?

Seems to be a popular spot for Job Shadowing.

The slippery slope of split-gender gym classes has turned to this: The boys play dodge ball, and the girls pole dance.

Finally, something fun to do with all that Art Class glitter: Stripper body-painting!

It’s not a Hooters, so they can’t be there for the Wings.

Okay, that’s it for me. I will still put up the merch we bought this week.

I’m not a big fan of popular music on the radio, generally. A handful of decent songs surrounded by a bunch of crap. But today the wife and I had a little faith restored in radio play. We heard Let It Go from the Disney movie Frozen.

Frozen is definitely the best Disney movie I’ve ever seen and I’ve been a fan of Idina Menzel (the woman who plays Elsa and sings Let It Got) since hearing her rendition of Defying Gravity as Elphaba from Wicked. I figured if the song was going to be on the radio it would be the Demi Lovato version you hear during the end credits of the movie, if anything.

But no, it was Menzel’s version. So that restored some faith in the radio for us today.

In case you’re as derpy as John Travolta and don’t know who Idina Menzel is (Adelle Dazeem, really?) here’s the video of the song:

You folks deserve more than just an SS post, but I’ll have big news for you in a couple of days to make up for it.

Anyway, I was driving to work yesterday and saw something fairly interesting. There was a school bus behind me. That’s not particularly interesting, I admit, but what was interesting was the bus driver. She was smoking.

Funny. But not appropriate on a school bus.

I couldn’t see for sure if there were children on the bus or not, but even if there weren’t…

Really? Smoking on a school bus? That shit should be a fire able offense. What the hell do people think nowadays?

I was recently reading this article about how Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, an eight-day long Jewish religious celebration, had occurred simultaneously last year. You see Thanksgiving occurred on the second day of Hannukah in 2013.

The article talked about the pros and cons of such an event. The main cons are people doing Hanukkah celebrations the following week because their friends have Thanksgiving commitments, or it’s just too much holiday party in one day; those kinds of issues.

The good news is it won’t happen again for over 79,000 years.

But it made me really think about one poor group of people: American Muslims.

An issue, I assure you, more than just a handful of Americans face.

You see, the 9th month of the Islamic calendar, Ramadan, requires all adult Muslims to fast, that is not eat or drink, from sunrise to sundown. The Islamic calendar, or Hijiri, does not match day-for-day to our modern Gregorian Calendar, so Ramadan moves around our calendar from year to year.

What about poor American Muslims who have to deal with Ramadan, the same time as Thanksgiving? Do they have to wait until sundown to start cooking the meal, or can they cook it during the day and just wait until sunset to eat?

The last time it occurred was 2002, and the next time it should occur would be at least 2034 as far as I understand.

We were at our local Denny’s Restaurant last night, where we like to frequent because the food is good, the prices are decent, and the service is pretty damn good. So needless to say I was feeling in a salad mood and I got a Grilled Chicken Salad. My fiancé was in a Chicken Sandwich mood so she got their Grilled Chicken Avocado Sandwich, but she doesn’t like the Avocado or Pico de Gallo that comes on it.

Sadly for her, she can’t pronounce Pico de Gallo properly, she always winds up stumbling over the Spanish somehow. So she’s grown fond of telling our usual waiter, “I’ll take the Chicken Avocado Sandwich, no avocado and no Pico de…pico…no Pikachu.”

Lo and behold when Keith, our waiter, returned with our food he put down my salad and my dressing, then placed her sandwich down, and finally sat down a bowl with a Pikachu key ring fob on it and exclaimed, “Oh shoot, I specifically told them no Pikachu!”

As you may have noticed, in my last post I used the term bastardized. Unfortunately WordPress does not seem to believe to it is a word. They have suggested the word Rasterized as a replacement.

This is a word I wasn’t too familiar with, so I looked it up. Unfortunately my dictionary does not believe it is a word (funnily enough, bastardized is one, though). Apparently rasterisation has something to do with vector graphics.

I guess you learn something new every day…unlike WordPress’ spell-check, apparently.

~RCS

By the way, rasterized…the past tense was fine. But the present-tense base word of rasterisation was not acceptable to WordPress. Nice.

I was getting a car insurance over the phone and the lady asked me if there was any accidents or tickets in the past five years. Of course I had to tell her about this one.

For a summary my fiancé was making a left turn and a woman with no headlights on, driving on a rainy evening, slammed into her without hitting her breaks. Caught my fiancé right in the back quarter side.

Unfortunately in stating the answer, my grasp of the English language kind of floated away. Worst part? It had happened earlier when I told her my vehicle is still owned by the bank, i.e. a lien, and I couldn’t get lien and lease to separate in my mind so I kept telling her my bank is the leense-holder. Ugh.

So she asked about accidents and I told her, “Yes, last year around June my fiancé was tea-bagged.”

Whoops.

For those who don’t know, the insurance agent did know, the difference between t-boning and tea-bagging can be illustrated by this photo comparison:

Left: T-Bone; Right: Tea-Bag.

Needless to say it took us a few minutes to compose ourselves before I could actually get my quote. But at least she didn’t just gasp and hang up on me saying something like, “Well I never…!”

~RCS

Of course, if you’ve never been tea-bagged how do you know what it is? Oh, right…Halo.

Today the facility I work at had a little get-together of some kind and one of the things they had was a “Jelly Bean Guessing” contest. I saw that and found myself thinking very strange thoughts. Just what the hell was a Jelly Bean Guessing contest?

Is that like…“Put on this blindfold and I’m going to stick something in your mouth, you guess whether it was a Jellybean or not!”?

Or maybe…“Eat this Jellybean and try to guess what flavor it is!”?

I was all the way down the hall from the flyer I was reading before it struck me just what the contest was…

I’m guessing 9 jellybeans are in the jar. But maybe that’s wishful thinking, because I am apparently very hungry for Jellybeans and want to eat the rest of them; so I’m going to guess that I would leave about 9 of them in the jar if I could get my hands on it.

This also reminds me of when I was about six years old and the local K-Mart store had a huge Lego mini-fig (as the little Lego People are technically called) made entirely from regular Legos. If you guessed the correct amount of Legos used to make the giant demonstration Lego man, you got about a thousand dollars worth of Lego merchandise, if I remember correctly.

With my first-grade education I was poised to take the challenge! I examined the Lego Man from all sides and guessed it was a lot, so my go-to number for ‘a lot’ was One Million. Little did I realize at the time I was secretly writing lines for Dr. Evil without knowing it.

“One Meelion Legos!”

I decided, “No…a million would probably fill this whole department of the store. Gotta be smaller than that, but still a lot.”

I thought and pondered, my mother urging me to just write a random number down (it didn’t matter, she told me, I was going to get it wrong anyway); but she didn’t understand just how much Lego swag I was about to win!

I chose 10,000 (actually I think I chose some very specific number, like 10,137, but I don’t recall the exact number). I submitted my slip figuring that I was probably not spot-on (low self-esteem) but that I was probably pretty close (naivety).

The actual number was like 75,000 Legos. Maybe I should have, instead, guessed how many Legos I would leave behind if they let me get my hands on the statue?

Conversation overheard between two men on their way out of work; one of them is a Russian immigrant. They were talking about St. Patrick’s Day.

The first man was asking if the Russian was going to do anything for St. Paddy’s Day. The Russian said he had no plans, which prompted the other guy to ask, “Do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Russia?”

The Russian shook his head and laughed, “No, we don’t have St. Patrick’s Day. But we do have a holiday that falls around a similar time.”

But the best part was the last bit after his punch line. When the other guy said, “End of winter? That sounds like a nice holiday,” the Russian hit him with a second punch line, “In Northern Russia they celebrate the end of winter for two weeks in July.”